Synopsis

David’s pregnant.

He’s always wanted to have children, and
being a stepfather for the past two years has been a great adventure. There’d
even been a plan to start looking into adoption and turn their family of three
into four.

But now there’s a bump, and David
doesn’t know what to do. He’s spent years escaping the grip of his own body and
burying the past—but there’s no way he can hide from his history if he lets the
bump get any bigger. It’s not just his baby; it’s also his breakdown.

Excerpt

He hung up and—very calmly—dropped the
phone out of the car window. Wound the window back up. Reversed a little to
give himself room to wriggle out from behind the BMW in front.

And—just as calmly—made sure to run over
the phone with the rear tyre as he drove off.

His palms were sweaty on the steering
wheel. His heart was thundering low in his stomach. David hadn’t had a panic
attack in nearly ten years, but the feeling was as familiar as ever—the
creeping darkness at the edges of his vision, the hyperawareness of his own
skin, the tightness across his ribs like he was having an asthma attack. He
tightened his grip. He needed to get control of himself. He was thirty-two
years old. He could—would—handle this like the responsible adult that he was.

He refused to break down screaming at
the wheel of a car, for God’s sake.

Thankfully, the phone call had happened
just around the corner from his usual parking spot. He slid the car into a free
space and bent forward to rest his forehead on the wheel. He raked a deep
breath in, held it for a count of ten, and let it out slowly.

All right.

So the test result was more or less his
worst nightmare. And he’d probably be having nightmares too.

But it could have been worse.
Practically speaking. It was a fixable nightmare. He could fix it. It didn’t
matter right now. He didn’t have to deal with it this minute. He could talk to
Ryan tonight, make an appointment in the morning—just not the one he’d promised
the nurse on the results line—and fix everything.

Slowly, his heart rate started to come
down out of the rafters. The tight band around his chest didn’t ease, but it
got a little easier to breathe.

“Fix it tomorrow,” he mumbled.

He straightened, squared his shoulders,
and opened the door.

David never bothered trying to park
right near the school. It was always a melee of mums and Mitsubishis, and he
was terrified of someone’s kid running into the road right under his bumper. It
was cool outside, threatening rain. The short walk helped clear the rest of the
panic out of his head, and refocus. Ava didn’t need to know about it. Everything
was fine, all happy and normal, no problems whatsoever, nothing.

The school gates were crowded as always,
but David had an advantage. In a sea of white mums, he stood out a mile. He
leaned against the metal fence, peering through the railings, until he caught
sight of two frizzy baubles of hair stuck out either side of a pair of wide,
searching eyes.

He waved, and the eyes lit up.

“David!”

“Sorry, excuse me, sorry, thanks,
sorry—”

He wrestled his way to the front just in
time to stoop and catch Ava as she hurled herself at his thighs. He hoisted her
up and turned to carry her through the crowd. She babbled in his ear about
finger painting, pizza, and a new gold star on her behaviour chart, and then
clung obstinately when he dropped her to the pavement again.

“Only babies need carrying during the
daytime,” David said. “You’re not a baby anymore, are you?”

It had been an infallible obedience tool
ever since she started school. She let go with a sulky expression and jammed
her sticky hand into his.

“Can we have pizza?” she repeated.

“We’ll ask Daddy.”

“Daddy never says yes to pizza,” Ava
said mournfully, in the same tone of voice one might use to say someone had
died.

Her buoyant mood was calming, even if
Ava was more of a hurricane than anything else. She was five and three-quarters
(never just five) and brimming over with energy. She didn’t even have the
decency to get tired by seven o’clock like normal five-year-olds. She went to
bed at the same time as her parents—and usually rocketed back out of it again
by six o’clock the next morning.

Still, her effusive enthusiasm helped.
There was nothing to panic about. He could fix things, and everything would be
back to normal next month anyway.

“Tell me about your new gold star,” he
said as she scrambled up into the back seat. “Do you need help with your
seatbelt?”

“No,” she said, giving him a look
definitely inherited from her mum. “I’m five. And three-quarters. I can do my
own seatbelt.”

“Show me,” David said.

To be fair, she could. Albeit with a lot
of faffing about. Once he heard the click, he promised a new star for her chart
at home and closed the door. In the short time it took him to walk around the
car and get into the driver’s seat, she’d started a whole new deluge of noise
masquerading as conversation, all about how rainbows were made.

David’s chest slowly unlocked as he
drove home to the background noise of a five-year-old on rainbows and a
fifty-year-old on the radio. He could hand her off to Ryan once they were back,
lock himself in the bathroom, and have a cry in the shower under the pretence
of a long, hard day at work. Maybe even have a soak in the bath. He felt bad
palming Ava off on her dad, especially on a Thursday, but—

Christ.

He just didn’t have the energy. Not
after that phone call.

Home was a roomy bungalow with a long,
narrow back garden, a decent view over some fields, and the ugliest bay windows
in the front David had ever seen. According to the locals, it was in a village
near Wakefield. According to everyone else—including David, who wasn’t even
from Yorkshire and was therefore regarded as an immigrant—it was in Wakefield.
The rest of the street was occupied by elderly white people called Gerald and
Betty whose lives revolved around gardening, Antiques Roadshow, and Women’s
Institute bake sales.

Ryan and Ava had been acceptable when
they first moved in. Cute toddlers were tickets to acceptance in these sorts of
villages, David suspected. And he’d found out the other week that half of them
thought Ryan was ex-army, which meant all the old blokes liked him by default.
But when David moved in, that popularity had taken a definite dive.

David didn’t really care. He was from
Salford. He could think of a lot worse than some tuts and disapproving scowls
from ninety-six-year-old Pamela next door. She was there, peering out from
behind her lace curtains, as he pulled into the drive. He waved, and the
curtain dropped.

“We’re going to be nice and quiet,” he
told Ava as he opened the door to let her out of the car. “Daddy went to see
Nathan this morning, so he might still be tired.”

Ava nodded, dragging her bag out after
her.

“If Daddy’s asleep, can we have pizza
before he wakes up?” she chirped as David unlocked the front door.

“Nope, Daddy will want dinner too.”

“But—”

“Aha!”

Ryan’s booming voice bounced down the
hall towards them as David opened the door. Ava squealed and shot into the
kitchen, jumping up at her dad like she hadn’t seen him in a thousand years
rather than eight hours.

“Hello, my little star!” He planted a
loud kiss on her cheek and grinned up at David. “What’s this? Two stars! Well,
well, well. What have I done to deserve this, eh?”

Then he smiled, a brilliant flash of
white streaking across his face like torchlight. And David—relaxed.

That was all it took sometimes. Just for
Ryan to flash him that megawatt grin, and all the fight seemed to drain out of
David’s body. Even the internal fight. Ryan had that—that air about him. When
he smiled, when he laughed, when he was happy, it was like the whole world had
to be happy as well. It was like everything faded away and was replaced with a
warm contentment, a feeling of security, the sense that no matter what
happened, he had Ryan with him.

He hadn’t fallen in love with Ryan at
first. He’d fallen in love with that smile.

In a lot of ways, Ryan was a ball-ache
of a boyfriend. Complete slob. Rap fan. Thought curries every night were
compatible with a sex life. David had become a de facto stepdad not three
months into their relationship from the sheer number of times Ryan simply
forgot which weekend he was supposed to have Ava, and had had to ring David on
his way home to swing by the school and pick her up.

But Ryan made him feel—

Warm.

And David could use warm.
Unceremoniously, he hoisted Ava up by the armpits, plonked her on the kitchen
tiles, and sat in Ryan’s lap looping both arms around his shoulders and
burrowing his face shamelessly into that thick neck.

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Meet the Author

Matthew J. Metzger is an ace, trans author posing as a functional human being in the wilds of Yorkshire, England. Although mainly a writer of contemporary, working-class romance, he also strays into fantasy when the mood strikes. Whatever the genre, the focus is inevitably on queer characters and their relationships, be they familial, platonic, sexual, or romantic.

When not crunching numbers at his day job, or writing books by night, Matthew can be found tweeting from the gym, being used as a pillow by his cat, or trying to keep his website in some semblance of order.